Tristram Cary

Composer acclaimed as the father of electronic music whose output ranged from
concert pieces to Doctor Who.

9:39PM BST 25 Apr 2008

Tristram Cary, the composer who died on Wednesday aged 82, was a leading exponent of electronic music, producing concert works and scores for films and television, including several episodes of Doctor Who.

Although Cary discovered that his output filled no fewer than 76 CDs, he was disappointed to be largely unrecognised in his native England, perhaps because he had emigrated to Australia in midlife.

In a global context, however, Cary was acknowledged as the father of electronic music.

Having experimented with sound and tape manipulation while working as a naval radar engineer during the Second World War, in the 1950s Cary created one of the first electronic music studios and worked on scores for such films as the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955), Hammer's Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and a three-part Disney adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper (1962).

In Doctor Who Cary scored incidental music for several memorable episodes, including the first to introduce the Daleks in December 1963, and others such as "Marco Polo" (1964), "The Daleks' Master Plan" (1966) and "The Mutants" (1972).

He also provided scores for television dramas such as Jane Eyre (1963) and Madame Bovary (1964).

Before emigrating to Australia in 1972 Cary was commissioned by the Olivetti company to write a piece using the noises of their office equipment.

The result was his Divertimento for 16 singers, jazz drummer and Olivetti machines, which was performed live at the opening of the firm's new training centre in Surrey, with Cary himself conducting in front of a VIP audience that included the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The text of the work comprised cardinal numbers sung in four languages.

Another innovative piece, his extended cantata Peccata mundi (for which he wrote his own libretto) was introduced at the 1972 Cheltenham Festival. It called for the conventional forces of chorus and orchestra, but with the addition of a speaking voice and four tape tracks.

Although Cary composed for traditional instruments and ensembles, his abiding interest lay in electronic music, which he wrote for concert performance in most of the accepted genres: synthetic, musique concrète (or a mixture of both), mixed works for live performers and electronic sounds.

As a founder director of Electronic Music Studios (EMS), he helped to design the VCS3 portable synthesiser, which Pink Floyd used on their 1973 concept album The Dark Side Of The Moon.

While visiting Australia to demonstrate the synthesiser to music lecturers, Cary was offered a one-year contract as visiting composer at Adelaide University.

In the event, he remained there for 12 years as senior lecturer until his retirement in 1986.

Tristram Ogilvie Cary was born on May 14 1925 in Oxford, the third son of the novelist Joyce Cary and his wife Gertrude.

Educated at Westminster, he was a King's scholar and a friend of both Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who introduced him to the music of Stravinsky.

Tristram won an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, but after two terms his Science studies were interrupted by the Second World War, and he served in the Royal Navy between 1943 and 1946.

Specialising in radar – he had been a radio enthusiast in his teens – he received training in electronics and grasped the potential of new technology from Germany that enabled sound to be recorded on magnetic tape; on his demobilisation in late 1946 he returned to Oxford, changed his degree course to PPE and immediately began experimenting with tape recorders.

He realised that, as well as being a way of reproducing sound, tape could be the source of an altogether new type of music.

After graduating Cary enrolled at the Trinity College of Music, studying composition, piano, horn, viola and conducting, and taught at evening classes to augment his student grant.

During the early 1950s Cary began to write and teach music and took a part-time job in a gramophone shop selling expensive hi-fi while developing his first electronic music studio.

By 1954 he was able to earn a full-time living writing music for radio, films and the emerging medium of television, as well as composing numerous concert works.

In an early experiment in the field of environmental sound, Cary provided a sound-environment for the different sections of the British pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal.

In the same year he founded the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, the first of its kind in Britain, and designed and built another for himself, which he transported from London to his house in Suffolk and subsequently to Australia, where it was incorporated into the expanding teaching studio at Adelaide University.

Returning to freelance composition, Cary drew on the university's studio and his own at home to generate music across the spectrum, from film scores to concert pieces.

In the mid-1990s there were performances of his work to mark his 70th birthday, and a new suite based on his music for the film The Ladykillers won TheGramophone magazine's award for best film music CD in 1998.

Cary also wrote on concerts and opera for The Australian, and in 2005 received the Adelaide Critics' Circle lifetime achievement award. Adelaide University honoured him with a Music doctorate in 2001.

A citizen of both Britain and Australia, in 1991 Cary was awarded the medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to Australian music. He also broadcast regularly.